Semantic image completion through an adversarial strategy

Abstract

Image completion or image inpainting is the task of filling in missing regions of an image. When those areas are large and the missing information is unique such that the information and redundancy available in the image is not useful to guide the completion, the task becomes even more challenging. This paper proposes an automatic semantic inpainting method able to reconstruct corrupted information of an image by semantically interpreting the image itself. It is based on an adversarial strategy followed by an energy-based completion algorithm. First, the data latent space is learned by training a modified Wasserstein generative adversarial network. Second, the learned semantic information is combined with a novel optimization loss able to recover missing regions conditioned by the available information. Moreover, we present an application in the context of face inpainting, where our method is used to generate a new face by integrating desired facial attributes or expressions from a reference face. This is achieved by slightly modifying the objective energy. Quantitative and qualitative top-tier results show the power and realism of the presented method.